Borrowing from Yourself
If you’re inspired to write a short story that isn’t slated for anything in particular, are you tempted to build a new world, or set your story in a world you’ve already created?
If you’ve already got a world that you’ve created, it’s entirely likely that there are potential stories that you haven’t gotten to tell there. Whether it’s a side story related to characters in a novel, or something interesting your world-building hints at, there could easily be things that you could borrow from yourself, in a manner of speaking. If the story shares a world with one you’ve already done the work on, you can save yourself some time and effort by using that pre-existing setting and world-building.
There are a couple of potential stories lurking in the Brass & Glass world, in the pieces of shared history between the characters. If I’m ever to return to that setting, it will likely start with some of those untold stories that only get hinted and teased at in the novels. In the meantime, I’ve got some other groups of stories set in the same worlds, like the Marsh sisters stories, the Cobalt City stories (which are actually in a shared world, too), and a few others that might not catch your attention as being set in the same world unless you look very closely!
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